NICK HARKAWAY

The writer talks politics, his new novel and his late father John Le Carré

- Jonathan Wright

DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS, A NOVELIST must walk – even if he doesn’t necessarily understand ahead of time why he had to go gumshoeing. At least that’s how Nick Harkaway explains the genesis of Titanium Noir, a novel that fuses elements of cyberpunk and the classic American detective novel as it follows wisecracking Cal Sounder, a specialist in the most sensitive cases, through a murder investigation that would try the ingenuity of even Philip Marlowe.

“I think unconsciously it’s possible that I decided fatigue was the primary attribute of our lives,” he says – laconically, as it would feel remiss not to add at this point. Harkaway is referencing not just the terrible tiredness that engulfed so many of us during the pandemic, but the “existential horror” of living through interesting times, the world of fighting over Brexit, Donald Trump, the Covid-19 pandemic, Ukraine and the threat of climate change.

More recently, the advent of AI in day-to-day life has made the top of the news agenda, but Harkaway isn’t so worried about this – at least not directly. “It’s on the one hand miraculous, it’s extraordinary what it can do, but it’s also sort of slightly terrible [at what it does],” he says.

“But I think it facilitates a whole bunch of other changes – not the ChatGPT stuff at all, but the use of AI in medical research and drug research, those kind of usages that you don’t see but which have massive effect as an accelerator. I honestly believe it’s biotechnology that will surprise us consistently over the next couple of decades.”

This plays into an idea in